On 6 March 2010 22:24, djdas <djdas at djdas.net> wrote:
>> As the team leader of the Neophysis Dev Team I'm proud to announce you a
> new distribution for our loved(?) Freerunner.
Well, of course it will be great to have another choice for the FR, if
it is rock-solid and supports all the important phone functions.
> - the phone stack should be oFono (reliable, multi-platform, fast)
Is oFono already rock-solid as regards GPRS? i.e.
- doesn't drop the GPRS connection prematurely
- allows simultaneous use of GPRS and phone calls
- deactivates GPRS cleanly (when requested) and can reactivate it later.
Also, is oFono better than FSO as regards
- never missing incoming SMS messages?
- handling split (CSM) messages?
> - a completely cutomized boot sequence to start in 30-50 secs maximum
Nice - but more for the implication that you have carefully considered
all the daemons and cut out what you don't need, than for the actual
boot time (which doesn't matter much if one rarely needs to reboot).
> What you can expect: well, it's in alpha stage, the only working thing
> is the dialer for placing and answering calls (no contact-list, just
> numbers :P) no SMS (we're working on them ATM), no suspend/resume, it's
> a simple phone :D it boots in about 40 seconds with the modem registered
> (NO PIN SUPPORTED ATM!!!), it works only with moko11 firmware; to
> shutdown, simply push the power button for 8 seconds (read-only
> filesystem so you can't break anything).
Are the limitations because of middleware problems (i.e. oFono) or
just because you haven't written the UI yet?
> Last but not least thanks to anyone who will believe in our project and
> will want to join us in this new adventure.
I will believe in it if it produces a rock-solid and full function
distribution soon.
For me, it raises the question of why people feel that they need to
start off their own thing, instead of contributing to an existing
project. I think one justification for this is if the new project
really produces a result quickly that is clearly better than the
existing projects. If that doesn't happen, I'm afraid I don't see the
point; the end result is only that we have N+1 not-quite-good-enough
distributions, instead of N.
FWIW, the same question obviously applies to oFono too (vs FSO). I
read some of the IRC logs about that, and the oFono guys only seemed
to have one technical reason for starting their own thing - because
they thought the FSO D-Bus API was too complex and exposed too much
unnecessary detail to applications/users.
Which on the one hand is not persuasive - because I'm sure it would
have been possible for them to add their proposed simpler API to FSO,
in parallel with the existing API - and on the other hand is a concern
- because it makes me wonder if an oFono-based distribution would be
able to support applications like Cellhunter?
So, in summary, I have misgivings about your choice to start your own
thing from scratch, but I wish you well and hope that Neophysis will
make rapid progress.
Oh, and finally:
"source code of our libraries and daemons is not yet open to anonymous
readers but only to active developers"
I hope you understand that this means that Neophysis is NOT free (or
open source) software. I encourage you to fix this very quickly!
Regards,
Neil